A few years ago I started a charity called MusicHeals. We provide benefits & incentives ranging from health insurance, life insurance, studio recording time, marketing, publicity, artist management, booking and more for FREE to musicians & artists who volunteer their time to our partner organizations by doing fundraisers, awareness campaigns, music therapy & music lessons for children, and other community work.
Basically "starving artist helping the starving masses".
It's been a great success and grown to almost 30 cities in several nations even though we are totally volunteer driven with no paid employees and currently all donations go directly to our partners which include hospitals, counseling / rehab clinics, schools & community development corporations for poor neighborhoods. ... all supported by musicians doing what they love to do! *I LOVE MY JOB*
I originally built our site on RadiantCMS; a Rails based CMS I am fond of, but never got around to customizing it to where we wanted it to be.
The designs have been complete for some time and I will attach them to this posts shortly.
I have been a professional web developer for going on 15 years now I just dont have the time to build the site out & have been told by my board to ask for help, so here I am...!
We have content writers and designers coming out our ears so I'm only looking for template & custom development help.
We have used Salesforce CRM in the past for member and partner management but after working with SS on a site for one of my clients I believe it is the system that best meets our needs for managing contextual data and interfacing with the public.
The main phases we are wanting to complete in the short term ( within the next 4 to 8 weeks ) are laid out below:
Phase One:
=== Basic Content Driven Site ( the basic framework ) ===
Timeline: 2-3 weeks from now
Complete our basic content-driven site with templates, sub templates or themes with sub-domain level control for each city we operate in ( ie; losangeles.musicheals.org, houston.musicheals.org, london.musicheals.org, etc ).
The usual contribution / donation, blog, newsletter & membership modules will apply for this initial phase.
We will handle content writing, design & UI components, and actual content load. So you as the volunteer developer(s) would only need to concentrate on making sure the car is ready to drive so to speak.
Phase Two:
=== Core CRM Development ===
Timeline: 3-5 weeks from now
We are moving towards becoming a membership based organization and we need to provide our members, volunteers and partners a method of managing the details of their accounts online. So we have a few member groups with some overlapping data that needs to be managed.
This will probably be some extension of ModelAdmin with a "public" view for registered users.
Phase Three:
=== Scheduling & Event Management ===
Timeline: 5-8 weeks from now
Building upon the data management framework developed in the prior phase we then need to manage schedules of events with logistics as well as develop a volunteer sign-up & resource management system.
We have detailed workflows, sitemaps, and even ERM models of how the data should relate. I understand that the third phase is a pretty big one to develop from scratch and I can look for a modest budget to help speed that along if necessary.
I've been doing charity work for almost a decade and am a seasoned & slightly jaded development veteran so I am always very careful about asking for help with anything for free because I too have gone down the road of being a completely taken advantage of on charity projects and cringe when asked sometimes.
As stated before our revenues go directly to our charitable partners or to underwrite health care & other benefits for our musicians who volunteer their time to the community.
So (dreaded words) we dont have a budget to work with but I can work something out from my own funds if I have a realistic projection of what is needed financially and am given time to raise the funds if necessary.
That said, I will say I am **VERY** easy to work with and have very clear and defined goals, preferred timelines & milestones; I just dont have the time to do it and we only have one other SS person currently in the volunteer pool.
This organization has been my baby for years & I started it out of my own pocket due to a strong belief that what we are now doing is important and vital. Due to my health and the growth of the organization it is at a stage where I must hand it over to the people who make it a reality on a daily basis and providing a strategically deployed point of presence on the internet is a huge part of that.
If you are interested in helping you would have my eternal gratitude and any favor we are able to do for you we will bend over backwards to accomplish! We work with a LOT of musicians and major entertainment companies to fulfill our mission so tickets to concerts or professional services such as recording studio time, production or graphic design is usually one of the first things we are able to offer as a trade. We're creative so if you can think of anything let me know and I'll see what we can do for you!
I will leave my plea for help with... the project triangle:
fast - cheap - good...
I know what I ask for and what that entails: cheap and good.
My expectations are realistic knowing that beggars cant be choosers.
Thanks guys!
- Ash
Founder / Executive Director / Lead Janitor
MusicHeals Inc
424-354-0590
http://www.musicheals.org
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/musicheals
Facebook: http://companies.to/musicheals
